HappyFox CSV exports lose conversation history. Use the REST API for full thread extraction and Puzzel's API ticket channels for import. Plan 2–4 weeks for a mid-size dataset.
There is no native migration path from HappyFox to Puzzel Case Management. HappyFox's built-in CSV export strips staff replies, client replies, and private notes, delivering only the initial message — making it unsuitable for any migration that requires conversation history. The two platforms have fundamentally different data models: HappyFox Categories serve as routing containers, while Puzzel separates routing (Teams) from metadata labeling (Categories), and HappyFox's flat custom fields must be restructured into Puzzel's Forms and Form Fields. A full-fidelity migration requires custom API-to-API extraction and transformation work, with automation rules, SLAs, and canned actions requiring manual recreation.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
TL;DR: HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management Migration
A HappyFox to Puzzel Case Management migration is a data-model redesign, not a CSV copy job. HappyFox's native CSV export strips staff replies, client replies, and private notes — you only get the initial message. You must use the HappyFox REST API (/api/1.1/json/tickets/) to extract full thread data. On the Puzzel side, tickets are created through API ticket channels with Basic Token or OAuth authentication. HappyFox Categories, Contact Groups, and Custom Fields do not map 1:1 to Puzzel's Teams, Categories, Forms, and Form Fields — each requires structural mapping decisions. Smart Rules, SLAs, and Canned Actions cannot be migrated programmatically. A typical mid-size migration (10,000–50,000 tickets) takes 2–4 weeks, broken down roughly as: 3–4 days planning and mapping, 3–5 days extraction, 3–5 days transformation and test loading, 2–3 days production loading and delta sync, and 2–3 days validation and cutover.
HappyFox "Categories" and Puzzel "Categories" are not the same concept
In HappyFox, a Category is the primary routing container (like a department). In Puzzel, Categories are metadata labels on tickets, while Teams handle routing. This naming collision causes mapping errors if you don't catch it early.
If your brief mentions Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, or Pipelines, pause
HappyFox Help Desk is built around contacts, contact groups, tickets, categories, and custom fields. Puzzel's model is customers, organisations, ticket attributes, categories, forms, and form fields. Sales objects belong in a CRM, not in this migration.
Attachment URL Expiry
HappyFox attachment URLs expire after 5 minutes. Your extraction script must download each attachment immediately upon retrieval. Do not store URLs for later download — they will be dead links by the time you use them.
Puzzel API rate limits are not publicly documented as a fixed number
Contact Puzzel support before running a bulk migration to understand your instance's throughput limits and request a temporary increase. The 'Outbound Integrations', 'Event Rules', and 'Response Mappings' features require activation on your Puzzel Case Management instance before use. Confirm API access is enabled before development starts.
Beware of Inline Images
HappyFox allows users to paste images directly into the ticket body. These are typically stored in one of three ways: (1) base64-encoded data URIs in the HTML, (2) authenticated URL references pointing to HappyFox's CDN, or (3) external image URLs. Types 1 and 2 require parsing and re-hosting: extract the image data, upload it as an attachment or to your own CDN, and replace the HTML src attribute with the new URL. Type 2 URLs will break after HappyFox deprovisioning, and type 1 URLs dramatically inflate ticket body size. If you migrate the raw HTML to Puzzel without parsing and re-hosting these images, they will appear as broken image icons to your agents.
The runbook
Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off.
Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.
Keep these open
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Pull the real numbers out of HappyFox
Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.
Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory -
Decide what history actually moves
Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.
A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.
COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off -
Confirm Puzzel Case Management can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Puzzel Case Management: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.
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Build the business case
Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.
Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management timeline -
Name owners and set the go/no-go date
One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.
HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management specifics
- Small team, <5K tickets, simple fields
- API-based migration with a single script (40–60 hours)
- Already on Puzzel Contact Centre, need ongoing sync
- Middleware for new tickets, API migration for historical
Don't move on until
- Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
- Success criteria signed off by the support lead
- Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it.
Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.
Keep these open
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Take a full HappyFox export and profile it
Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.
Data Profiler Profile the HappyFox export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform
Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.
A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.
CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export -
Inventory PII and set retention
Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.
Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.
PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system -
Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references
Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in HappyFox where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.
Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns -
Clean and normalise the export
Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.
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Produce a masked copy for sandbox work
Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.
PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing
Don't move on until
- Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
- PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
- Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec.
Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.
Keep these open
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Generate the first-pass HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management field map
Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".
Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management field pair -
Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names
Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.
Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.
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Decide how custom fields land
Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Puzzel Case Management has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
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Resolve identity and threading
Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.
Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.
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Plan attachments, inline images and threading order
Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.
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Freeze and sign off the mapping spec
Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.
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Contact Groups → Organisations
Map domain-tagged groups to Puzzel Organisations; flatten multi-group logic where needed
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet
HappyFox → Puzzel Case Management specifics
- Status mapping
- Map HappyFox statuses to Puzzel equivalents using the translation dictionary defined in your mapping document
- Category → Team + Category split
- Decide which HappyFox Categories become Puzzel Teams and which become Puzzel Categories
- Custom fields → Forms
- Group HappyFox custom fields into Puzzel Form structures
- Timestamp normalization
- Ensure UTC consistency across all records; HappyFox returns timestamps in the account's configured timezone
- HTML sanitization
- Clean ticket body HTML for Puzzel's editor compatibility — watch for inline images stored as base64 or authenticated URL references (see Edge Cases section)
Don't move on until
- Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
- Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
- Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice.
Objective A pilot load into a Puzzel Case Management sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Puzzel Case Management sandbox that matches production config
Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.
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Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample
Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.
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Run the load with masked data and instrument everything
Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.
PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox -
Measure real throughput against the rate limit
Record achieved records-per-hour under Puzzel Case Management's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.
Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.
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Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure
Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.
Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up -
Put real agents in front of the pilot data
Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.
Don't move on until
- Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
- Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
- Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window.
Objective All in-scope data live in Puzzel Case Management, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
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Pre-load history before the freeze
Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while HappyFox stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.
Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from Puzzel Case Management's real API limits -
Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria
A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.
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Freeze HappyFox and take the final delta
Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.
Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.
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Load the delta and open tickets
Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.
Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen -
Repoint channels and verify with live traffic
Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.
Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.
Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze -
Run the go/no-go and switch the agents
Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep HappyFox read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
Don't move on until
- Full historical load complete and counts matched
- Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
- Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out.
Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.
Keep these open
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Run the full reconciliation
Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.
Migration Validation Tool Reconcile HappyFox and Puzzel Case Management record-for-record -
Verify field completeness, not just record counts
Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.
Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load -
Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines
Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.
SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.
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Test the workflow layer end to end
Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.
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Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Puzzel Case Management, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.
PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for -
Sign off, then decommission on a schedule
Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep HappyFox read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.
Don't move on until
- Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
- Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
- Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled
Field mapping reference
The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.
HappyFox Puzzel Case Management
| HappyFox field | Puzzel Case Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket ID (display ID) | Ticket Reference / external_reference_id | Puzzel assigns its own IDs; store HappyFox ID in a custom field for traceability |
| Subject | Subject | Direct map |
| Category | Team + Category | Split: Team handles routing, Category handles classification |
| Status | Status | Map HappyFox statuses → Puzzel statuses (see status mapping table below) |
| Priority | Priority | Direct map (verify priority level names match) |
| Assignee | Assigned User | Map agent emails; agents must exist in Puzzel first |
| Tags | Tags | Direct map |
| Custom Fields | Form Fields | Requires creating matching Forms in Puzzel first |
| created_at | created_at | Preserve historical timestamp via API |
| text (initial message) | Description | HTML/Text |
Status Suggested Puzzel Status
| HappyFox field | Puzzel Case Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| New | Open | Default initial state |
| In Progress | Open | Puzzel uses assignment + Open rather than a separate "In Progress" |
| On Hold | Pending | Indicates waiting on external input |
| Resolved | Solved | Agent considers issue resolved |
| Closed | Closed | Ticket fully closed |
| Custom statuses | Map to nearest equivalent | Document each custom status decision |
HappyFox Puzzel Case Management
| HappyFox field | Puzzel Case Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Contact Name | Customer Name | Direct map |
| Contact Email | Customer Email | Primary identifier for ticket association; normalize to lowercase |
| Contact Phone | Customer Phone | May need custom attribute in Puzzel |
| Contact Group | Organisation | A Puzzel customer can optionally use the dimension 'organisations'. If used, you will find the name and description for each organisation record. |
| Contact Custom Fields | Organisation Custom Attributes | Verify data type compatibility |
HappyFox Puzzel Case Management
| HappyFox field | Puzzel Case Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Staff Reply | Outbound message / Note | In Puzzel, notes can be flagged as public or private. When a note has been marked as private, it will not be exposed when retrieving ticket content via an API channel. |
| Client Reply | Inbound message | Chronological order must be preserved |
| Private Note | Private Note | Must set private flag correctly |
| Attachments | Attachments | Re-upload required; HappyFox URLs expire in 5 minutes |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets (Metadata) | medium | Ticket metadata such as status, priority, and timestamps can be extracted via API, but status values require mapping between HappyFox's customisable statuses and Puzzel's configurable status set. |
| Conversation Threads | high | Full conversation history including staff replies, client replies, and private notes is only available through the HappyFox REST API and must be carefully replayed in order into Puzzel's ticket channel. |
| Contacts | low | Contact records can be exported via CSV or API and mapped to Puzzel customer records with relatively straightforward field-level mapping. |
| Contact Groups | medium | HappyFox's many-to-many contact-to-group relationships must be flattened to a single Puzzel Organisation per customer, with secondary affiliations stored in custom attributes or lost. |
| Custom Fields | high | HappyFox's flat custom fields must be restructured into Puzzel's Forms and Form Fields model, requiring per-field mapping decisions and potential data type transformations. |
| Attachments | high | Attachment URLs expire after 5 minutes in HappyFox, requiring real-time download during extraction and re-upload to Puzzel, with significant operational overhead at scale. |
| Tags | low | Tags are simple string values that can be extracted and applied to Puzzel tickets with minimal transformation required. |
| SLA Policies | high | HappyFox's built-in SLA policies cannot be migrated programmatically and must be manually recreated using Puzzel's SLA analysis and reporting configuration. |
| Automation Rules | high | Smart Rules and Canned Actions in HappyFox have no programmatic migration path and must be manually rebuilt as Puzzel Inbound Rules, Event Rules, and Outbound Integrations. |
| Knowledge Base Articles | medium | HappyFox's built-in KB articles must be migrated to Puzzel's Customer Hub, which is an additional paid feature with a different content structure. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
CSV Export Loses Threads
HappyFox's native CSV export only includes the initial client message and subject line, stripping all staff replies, client replies, and private notes, forcing reliance on the REST API for full conversation extraction.
Category Naming Collision
HappyFox 'Categories' are primary routing containers (departments), while Puzzel 'Categories' are metadata labels on tickets with Teams handling routing, causing mapping errors if not addressed early in planning.
Custom Field Structural Mismatch
HappyFox uses flat ticket-level custom fields (text, dropdown, date, checkbox) that must be restructured into Puzzel's Forms and Form Fields paradigm, where pre-defined field sets are associated per ticket type.
Attachment URL Expiration
HappyFox attachment URLs expire after 5 minutes, requiring every attachment to be downloaded during extraction and re-uploaded to Puzzel, which at scale can involve hundreds of thousands of file operations.
Contact Group Flattening
HappyFox supports many-to-many contact-to-group relationships with a primary contact group, but Puzzel uses a single optional Organisation per customer, requiring flattening of multi-group affiliations.
Automation Manual Recreation
Smart Rules, SLA policies, and Canned Actions in HappyFox cannot be migrated programmatically and must be manually rebuilt as Inbound Rules, Event Rules, and Outbound Integrations in Puzzel.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I export conversation history from HappyFox via CSV?
No. HappyFox's native CSV export only includes the initial message and subject. Staff replies, client replies, and private notes are excluded. You must use the HappyFox REST API (/api/1.1/json/ticket/<id>/) to extract full conversation threads.
How long does a HappyFox to Puzzel Case Management migration take?
A standard migration with 10,000–50,000 tickets takes 2–4 weeks, including data mapping, test migrations, and validation. Smaller datasets under 5,000 tickets can be completed in 1–2 weeks with dedicated engineering effort.
Do HappyFox Categories map directly to Puzzel Categories?
No. Despite the shared name, they serve different purposes. HappyFox Categories are routing containers (like departments). Puzzel Categories are metadata labels on tickets, while Teams handle routing. You need to split each HappyFox Category into a Puzzel Team and one or more Puzzel Categories.
Can HappyFox Smart Rules and SLAs be migrated to Puzzel automatically?
No. HappyFox Smart Rules, SLA policies, Canned Actions, and satisfaction surveys cannot be exported or migrated programmatically. They must be manually documented and rebuilt in Puzzel using Inbound Rules, Event Rules, and response templates.
Does Puzzel Case Management have a bulk ticket import API?
Puzzel does not publicly document a dedicated bulk import endpoint. Tickets are created one at a time through API ticket channels. Contact Puzzel support to discuss throughput limits and request temporary rate limit increases for migration workloads.